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Hēi diào ‘to turn black’ (黑掉) denotes a change-of-state meaning, but in social media, it has a special pragmatic use that emphasizes “bad consequences” following an uncooperative act, whether right or wrong. This metaphorical and new transitive use of hēi diào, which is unique among netizens, has changed the literal status of hēi ‘black’ to other additional accomplishment/achievement meanings. Our study examined the expression hēi diào using data from a social media corpus, the PTT Bulletin Board System. We also analysed all the constructions of hēi diào and similar [V diào (掉)] patterns in the corpus. Unlike most previous work, which analysed the uses of [V diào] only, our study observed pragmatic connotations of hēi diào in social media—uses that only materialized in certain contexts.

The occurrences of kill and killer are often understood as negative; however, evidence suggests that these words also have positive meanings. To many people, the use of kill and killer indicates physical death, but we found other meanings of these words. First, death is the worst possible outcome, but it is not necessarily a consequence of kill and killer. Second, killer, in particular, has a strong positive meaning that is extended from the ‘deadly’ meaning of kill. Third, we found that the figurative use of killer appeared more often in magazines and newspapers, as well as in fiction but with different purposes, when we compared the data from magazines and newspapers with those from different genres. The results obtained by analysing magazine and newspaper corpora in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) showed the importance of pragmatic interpretation in understanding meanings.

The analysis in this paper was based on five Malay narratives of the “frog story”. In these narratives, the types of lexical arguments and their relations with information flow and topic continuity were analyzed. It was found that most narrators used one lexical argument in telling the frog story (e.g., sarang itu jatuh “the nest fell”). About 60% of the verbs in the narratives contained one lexical argument only. Some transitive verbs that usually require the presence of both lexical arguments were used with one lexical argument only when produced in speech (e.g., dia mencari ø di merata tempat “he searched (for) ø everywhere”). Objects were sometimes omitted, as their meanings could be predicted from previous context. Despite the omission of objects, transitive constructions still prevailed in the stories. The most frequently occurring lexical arguments were objects (O) (37%), followed by intransitive subjects (S) (29%) and transitive subjects (A) (27%). In addition, our results showed that new information in Malay was usually allocated to the core argument of the object and to locative expressions, indicating that most of the new information appeared at the end of a clause. On the other hand, topic continuity was held between the subjects in two continuous intonation units. This clear-cut division of discourse functions in the heads and tails of constructions was consistently found in the five pieces of narration. This observation not only showed how ideas could be continued in Malay oral narratives, but also contributes to the study of discourse structure in Malay.

This paper analyses English news reporting in Malaysia (New Straits Times) and in the United Kingdom (The Times) over several consecutive months during the SARS epidemic in 2003. While the physical features (word counts, standardised type/token ratio, number of sentences, etc.) of both corpora were consistent (and the two newspapers used mostly the same metaphorical lexis), differing features of the two newspapers were found in the rhetoric meaning. A corpus-based investigation of the presentation of news, selection of lexis, and the foci of reporting during the SARS epidemic is thus proposed. The results show that news from Malaysia focused on patriotism along with an emotional hopeful attitude, while news reporting in The Times seemed to be emotionally detached and less personal, reporting mainly on the fall of the stock markets and cancellations of cultural and sports events. In addition, The Times was found to have often considered manifestations of global economic status and power.